Karelia Article Outline

REPRESENTATION, EQUITY & ENVIRONMENT Working Paper Series WP # 30 ‘Fragmented Belonging’ on Russia’s Western Frontier and Local Government Development in Karelia by Tomila Lankina August 2007 The Representation, Equity and Environment Working Paper Series This series is a continuation of WRI’s ‘Environmental Accountability in Africa’ working paper series (Working Papers number 1 through 22). The series was renamed to reflect the Equity Poverty and Environment team’s broadening, mostly through comparative research, to include research and analysis worldwide. This periodic working paper series presents new research on democratic decentralization and legislative representation concerning the management, control and use of natural resources. The series will present research and analysis on the effects of policies on the distribution of profits and other benefits within natural resource commodity chains and the distribution of government revenues from natural resource exploitation and trade. The objective of this working paper series is to provide researchers working at the intersection of governance and natural resource management with a forum in which to present their findings and receive feedback from scholars and practitioners around the world. Your comments can be sent to the series editor at WRI or to the authors at the contact information listed at the back of each working paper. Cover Image Artist: Mor Gueye Mor Gueye is an internationally renowned Senegalese artist. At over 80 years of age, Mor Gueye is considered the ‘dean’ of Senegal’s reverse glass painters. This technique, where he paints on one side of a glass pane to be viewed from the other, is popular in urban Senegal. The reverse glass paintings on the cover were photographed by Franklin Pierre Khoury, the art photographer of the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. ii REPRESENTATION, EQUITY AND ENVIRONMENT WORKING PAPERS: WP #30 ‘Fragmented Belonging’ on Russia’s Western Frontier and Local Government Development in Karelia by Tomila Lankina August 2007 Series editor: Institutions and Governance Program Jesse RIBOT 10 G Street, N.E., Suite 800 Washington, D.C. 20002 USA www.wri.org ABSTRACT Karelia is a forestry-rich region on Russia’s Northwestern frontier. This article shows how institutional arrangements for local government were a product of contending efforts of Western donors and other transnational actors, the federal and regional governments, as well as municipalities. Russia’s federal recentralizing reforms and broader authoritarian context notwithstanding, Karelia illustrates how the choice of local institutions, as well as ideas about representation and citizenship are increasingly shaped by actors beyond the central state. Borrowing insights from Joel Migdal and Jesse Ribot, it argues that the result is shifting cognitive boundaries and ‘fragmented belonging’ (Ribot 2007) or multiple reference points of local citizens in a dynamic process of contestation and re-contestation of citizenship. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Institutions and Governance Program, World Resources Institute, Washington DC, for providing support for field research for this paper, and to Ludmila Morozova of the Karelian Branch of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature, for facilitating research in Karelia. I am also grateful to participants at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property in Bali, Indonesia in June 2006, as well as those at the conference on Federalism, Power and the North: Governance Reforms in Russia and Canada, held at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto in December 2006, for their comments on the paper presentation. I am also particularly indebted to Jesse Ribot, Ashwini Chhatre, Dorian Fougeres, Bob Orttung, and Vladimir Gel’man for valuable comments and suggestions. Any errors or inaccuracies are of course solely my own. Support for the comparative WRI Institutional Choice and Recognition Project, of which this working paper is a part, was generously furnished by the World Bank Program on Forestry (PROFOR) and by USAID’s Economic Growth, Agriculture and Technology division (EGAT). iv INTRODUCTION Karelia is a forest-rich region on Russia’s border with Finland. In the 1990s, Western donors were successful in influencing the institutional arrangements of local government in Karelia. They stressed the importance of downwardly accountable institutions, cooperation between civil society organizations, municipalities, and the broader public, and social cohesion. The federal government by contrast, in 2003 embarked on recentralization, curbing local government independence and reducing its financial power. In the forestry sector, it has sought to eliminate even the limited powers of local governments in resource management. These reforms and Russia’s broader authoritarian context notwithstanding, Karelia illustrates how local institutions and ideas about representation and citizenship are outcomes of a dynamic process in which actors beyond the central state play a prominent role. Over the past two decades, dozens of countries worldwide have embraced decentralization as an institutional form that would promote efficiency, equity, and democracy. The logic behind these efforts is that if the right mix of institutions is in place, ‘genuine’ decentralization could solve many of the problems that local communities face in newly democratizing and developing contexts. As Ribot (2004) poignantly observes, however, getting to the if has proven to be a challenge, with many an ostensibly decentralized community still ‘waiting for democracy’. Indeed, few countries boast the mix of institutions that arguably makes for ‘genuine’ decentralization—democratically elected local authorities with their own tax and revenue base and legal guarantees for decision making on locally specific issues. Approximating the ‘if’ scenario, however, has likewise proved no panacea against the deeply embedded patterns of social exclusion, corruption, or inequity plaguing many a local community (Crook and Manor, 1998; Lankina, 2004). Regular democratic elections do not always make the mayors or councilors more accountable to local needs; and increasing the localities’ revenue base sometimes serves to transpose the corruption ‘pathologies’ of the center to the local level (Carothers, 1999). Democratic local government institutions might be there, but they too often fail to translate into local representation, equity, and empowerment. These facts have been a source of frustration for decentralization advocates. Compounding these frustrations is a failure to locate decentralization in the broader contemporary contexts. Democratic decentralization is meant to strengthen citizenship and ‘belonging’ (Ribot, 2007) in the nation-state and ensure that local governments have adequate resources to promote social equity. And yet, scholars now question and redefine the very meanings of citizenship faced with globalization and other external influences on the nation-state. Irrespective of whether the effects of these developments are positive or negative, they have to be factored into the analyses of decentralization. Modern conceptions of citizenship, intricately tied to those of the nation-state, include a package of hard-fought-for rights that populations in Western democracies incrementally attained over the last two centuries. Sparke (2004) distinguishes three key forms of citizenship: civil citizenship, such as the right to protection of private property and 1 freedom of market access; political citizenship, such as the right to vote and run for office; and social citizenship, the guarantee of basic social necessities for a decent standard of living. In many decentralizing settings, local governments have been faulted for being unprepared for, or incapable of, adequately serving these goals of advancing citizenship. Local governments indeed often lack formal powers related to key civil citizenship rights as the respective authority is often vested with the national government or its deconcentrated state agencies; electoral rules related to who gets to sit on the councils often do not ensure broad-based citizen representation; and the local authorities’ financial powers are usually weak, hence the inadequacy of social services provision. And yet all of these issues are at the core of the debates about the weaknesses of the modern democratic polity as a whole. Some scholars argue that neo-liberalism and the imposition of market-based forms of governance have arguably strengthened the power of big business at the expense of citizen rights. These tendencies have also arguably resulted in the curtailing of social programs in Western democracies. Finally, in many democracies citizens feel they cannot influence the government through the ballot box (Sparke, 2004). In addition to these substantive aspects of citizenship, which bind ruler and ruled in a web of mutual rights and obligations, citizenship is also about national and local identity, or what Ribot refers to as belonging (2007). Ribot suggests that here too local governments are to play a pivotal role, fostering an integrated public domain and residency-based forms of citizenship and belonging in a given polity (Ribot, 2004, 2007). As at the advent of modernity, local governments are there to help turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ (Weber, 1976). Particularly in developing settings, a democratically elected village council, it goes,

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